Episode Thirteen: Cabbages and Kings

by Robert G. Ferrell

ake sat at the incarcerated Merv's terminal and scratched his head. The military security people had told him that this box was sending bursts of (presumed) classified data to an undisclosed location in another country. Okay, except that this segment of the network had no physical attachment to the secured net. In fact, the segment into which this box was plugged wasn't even on his network map. That was a little disturbing, but not entirely surprising, since the data telecomm documentation he'd inherited from his predecessor was a little on the skimpy side. Facilities wasn't exactly the center of the Acme Ailerons computing universe, after all. Jake felt he had a pretty decent grasp of the overall topology of the networks under his control, but every now and then something like this popped up to remind him that he was a bit shy of omniscience.